2010/10/28 – Is Giving Up the Mind the Same as Giving Up the Self?

The critics of Desteni uniformly hold the opinion that the Desteni group engages in a program that brainwashes people through “cultish” activities and “thought reform.” The specifics concerning the nature of these so-called forbidden rituals are never enumerated, and they don’t really have to be, seeing how Desteni critics hide underground in the dank caves of their anonymous cowardice, which speaks volumes on the excruciating and resonant fear Desteni evokes within their weak, pathetic minds. They are so appalled by what they see as manipulation and “equal money scams,” that they find it permissible and honorable to engage in deceptive dissembling and smears against Desteni on You Tube, fringe message boards and most hilariously on the Rick Ross Cult Infotainment Forum. Check out the thread on Desteni there if you want a first-hand account how paranoia, spitefulness, mendacity and wishful thinking can turn people into raging maniacs. It only gets interesting when they periodically turn on each other in seeing who’s the biggest and baddest Cult Oppressor of them all. A theater for sick minds banding together for the love of a common purpose. Sounds an awful like a “cult” to me, but I digress.

Hands down, the most vociferous of the smear campaigns by the Desteni critics is that they fear the group has designs on others to “give up the mind,” presumably so that Desteni can turn them into baby-eating zombies-bots or something. It’s a smear made by superstitious and fearful people against a group who is making too much noise about the state of the world and the need for Equality as the solution. Faithful readers of the P:SH Blog are already familiar with the incredible task of establishing Equality against the incoming tide of opposition by people who have no intention of establishing an equal money system. They would rather see the world destroyed and everyone in it through their own greed and ego, than give up their ideas about their precious money and their overpowering desire to be right, and these are the real points behind all of their accusations.

Those who hold the opinion that science can rationally explain everything worth explaining, will treat any view that questions the wonderful and holy aspect of the mind’s role in the life of human beings as the most damning of heresies. These positivists say Desteni wants people to give up the mind, which they translate into meaning, “to give up the self.”

The Philosophy of the Mind

Does giving up the mind really amount to the same thing as giving up the self? Does consciousness exist independently of the body or is it dependent? Obviously, for those who equate being with consciousness, the idea of “stopping the mind,” is the same as suicide. The Philosophy of the Mind has batted this question back and forth down through the ages with no clear-cut result. On the opposing sides of the issue are the materialists, who believe everything is physical (including consciousness), and the Idealists, who believe reality is both apprehended by consciousness and is consciousness at the same time. Both East and West have held the latter point of view for centuries. The Hindu god Brahma (or his aspect Vishnu), mentally dreamed an illusory existence into being. In the West, the ancient Greeks held the opinion that existence was subject to a Divine Plan initiated by a Divine Mind. Plato claimed that the physical reality was an imperfect copy of the ultimate reality within a transcendent realm of Forms, or “Ideas.”

The German Idealists like Kant, Leibniz and Hegel, helped form Idealism as an outflow of the Enlightenment, which was the 18th and 19th century European intellectual movement that championed thought, rationality and individualism over religious belief and sensation. They took Plato’s theories and concluded that physical reality wasn’t based on an extra-dimensional realm of Ideas at all, but within human consciousness. The Idealists merely transposed ideas of divine consciousness down to the human level of consciousness. The Theosophists and their 20th century descendants, the New Agers, really took a shine to anything labeled, “divine consciousness,” which they took as God Itself and by claiming such a connection, becoming gods themselves. Scientists, however, really have no clue about what consciousness is or how it arises out of a the aggregation of the physical cells that make up the human body, due chiefly to the lack of scientific machinery that can measure such things. All that’s left to do is to debate.

Of course, the critics of Desteni also think highly of consciousness. They hold the opinion that consciousness does not exist independently of the self. They somehow believe, without doing the most casual reading of what Desteni actually says, that Desteni wants to empty minds in order to fill them with something nefarious and evil. Sounds scary, but it’s not true. Desteni just wants to present a simple, and scandalous consideration that consciousness may not be (gasp!) the best or essential part of a human being.

The mind just may be a liability that only enslaves the human being within limited, repetitive patterns. The mind just may be a liability that traps people through its highly programmable design. Madison Avenue got hip pretty quickly when they realized how easy it was to manipulate and direct the American People with specific placements of words, sounds and symbols. What’s even worse is that people generally understand that they are being programmed though the media – and the dumbasses are still generally “Ok” about it.

I get it. People are free to believe that what makes human beings human is a personality or a consciousness mind. And I guess they are “free” to lob bombs towards Desteni because they don’t like what they perceive as an “anti-mind” message, a message which isn’t often clearly understood, for the critics have decided to follow their programmed response of considering the mind, personality or consciousness as a thing beyond criticism, as the mind is seen as the most essential aspect of a human being. So what’s up with our special human minds that makes it such an indispensable thing?

Well, peeking inside a typical human’s dome, we can see memories, judgments, opinions, knowledge and thoughts that generate hate, love, wishes, dreams and personalities floating about in there. Knowledge and information piped in from the outside from parents, people, the media, school, religion, and nationalism that unceasingly filled the mind with all kinds of patterns and opinions that go around in circles until death. No new idea can ever be introduced, because consciousness wasn’t is not designed to carry new ideas. The mind’s sole purpose is to recycle and re-evaluate knowledge already stored in the mind.While the mind does allow retrieval and understand “new knowledge,” say, in the form of reading and understanding a new book or being introduced a new concepts by someone else, the human mind cannot think up anything truly new. The all-powerful mind cannot cough up a single, new thought.

This is a puzzle because we see the handiwork of consciousness everywhere: cities, engineering, plastic and nuclear waste we dump in the ocean, and of course, fine art. But nothing truly new. If consciousness was all that and a bag of chips, There should be new thoughts appearing all the time, but this hasn’t happened. This is a serious flaw in the belief of the Supermind. It could mean consciousness could be devolving and looking back at the past. We see this same backward glance in fashion, arts and philosophy. Fashion, as the old saying goes, “always looks to the past.” Styles come in and go out of fashion, only to return to at a later time as a “classic.” Hegel noticed that Philosophy follows this same repetitive cycle, as “a circle of circles.” Philosophy of the Mind created by the Mind running over the same ground within an infinite Fibonacci spiral. Is that the most we can expect of “Divine Consciousness,” a ridiculous, Holy Mental Loop?

It is sad to see people fight for their own limitations. Desteni has concluded, by the weight of their research and evidence, that the mind is not the same as self. There is a life essence that can exist without the mind controlling its host like a head crab from the Half-Life video games. The critics that rail against Desteni for want everyone to kill their consciousness, have read the material through a filter of their own fears, and are intentionally misreading and mischaracterizing Desteni’s points. However, Desteni does not equate the mind with the self, the condition does exist of the self having become the mind. This mind-self will follow the mind no matter where it leads; even over the wall of death. People should really take a good, hard look at what they “think” is important.